Play It Smart is in trouble, which is not smart at all.
It would be just plain stupid if one of the sharpest attempts to make athletes better people faded from the Chicago Public League.
The program isn’t perfect, mainly because it misses too many kids. It includes only football players and is in just 136 schools nationwide, including six in active operation in Illinois.
Adding schools has been a major goal, but because of a funding crisis, avoiding subtraction is the best we can hope for now. In Chicago that will take $152,000, the amount that will keep Play It Smart going at Dunbar, Fenger, Harlan, Hubbard, Hyde Park and South Shore as well as at Chicago Vocational and Simeon, which are working to get their programs off the ground.
Play It Smart uses kids’ passion for sports as a hook to help them develop as students and human beings. What makes it work are “academic coaches” who spend at least 20 hours a week in Play It Smart schools, whose students are mostly disadvantaged and lack family and community support.
These coaches, who are considered members of the football coaching staffs, run study halls, teach life skills, check with teachers, arrange ACT preparation, help with college selection, set up field trips and community service projects and serve as mentors and ombudsmen.
The National Football Foundation, which created and runs Play It Smart, claims participation makes an athlete more likely to graduate from high school and attend college. Local results back that up.
Miriam Merrill, the academic coach at Harlan and Hyde Park, said her players’ grades have improved this school year. Her athletes also have benefited from participating in a multitude of community service projects, including food preparation at the Greater Chicago Food Depository and Chicago Bears drives to help the poor and Hurricane Katrina victims.
“A lot of players, you don’t think they’re getting it, but eventually they do,” said Merrill, a former University of Cincinnati track athlete. “This is definitely a valuable resource these kids need to continue to have.”
The U.S. Department of Education was impressed enough to give Play It Smart a five-year, multimillion-dollar grant, but NFF officials said funding ended after one year, sparking the funding crisis.
Funds arranged by the Bears, state Senators Jacqueline Collins and Kwame Raoul and the NFF saved the day locally, and Play It Smart officials were optimistic they could resurrect federal funding.
When that fell through, the NFF established a funding formula under which it provides $8,000 of each school’s projected $27,000 Play It Smart budget, and the local Play It Smart organization supplies the rest.
That brings us back to $152,000, and little of it has surfaced so far because the NFF didn’t announce the new formula until about three months ago.
“The danger is that 600 kids could be without these services,” said Stephen Wilkins, project manager in the Chicago Public Schools Department of Sports Administration and head of the local Play It Smart advisory board.
To avoid that fate a mere five years after Play It Smart arrived here, starting at Hubbard, Wilkins plans to appeal to sources that again will include local state senators and the Bears.
Meanwhile, the Chicago Metro Chapter of the NFF will put on a golf tournament July 17 at Hawthorn Woods Country Club, with proceeds going to the local Play It Smart program. The cost is $2,000 a foursome, with a celebrity joining each foursome as a fifth golfer.
Celebrities expected to attend include Bears defensive coordinator Ron Rivera, former Bears players Steve McMichael, Richard Dent, Dan Jiggetts, Bobby Douglass, Brian Baschnagel, Dave Duerson, Emery Moorehead and Ronnie Bull, Northwestern athletic director Mark Murphy and Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema.
Prizes and auction items include trips to the 2007 Masters and ESPY Awards, airline tickets, game tickets and memorabilia.
For information, contact Chris Kearney at 847-507-9834 or [email protected].
Long term, Play It Smart’s fate here depends not only on these kinds of efforts but also on the local advisory board’s becoming a non-profit organization that can raise funds itself.
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“What I hope for a year from now is the creation of this formal local entity to take on the task of raising enough money to fund the program and expand it because the need is greater than what we are serving right now,” Wilkins said.
Nationally, Play It Smart is seeking funds from corporations, foundations and the like. National director Charles Gomes said another goal is to help local boards raise money.
“It’s a matter of what we have to do to sustain Play It Smart so we don’t have to go through this every year,” he said. “No one wants to see it go away.”
One of the best ways to keep it, of course, would be to convince some zillionaire NFL players to write a few checks themselves.
If enough did, maybe Play It Smart could get not only into more schools but also into more sports.
Considering the academic mess in our high schools, that would really be playing it smart.
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